Source code for Freeciv-web running on Freecivweb.org

Web version of freeciv. Please mention the site you're using, if speaking things other than general freeciv-web codebase.
Lexxie
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Re: Source code for Freeciv-web running on Freecivweb.org

Post by Lexxie »

louis94 wrote:
sveinung wrote:This line has been removed. Is there anything else that copyright holders believes makes freecivweb.org non AGPLv3 compliant?
1 To be honest, I don't know. Their legalese is too poorly written for me to understand what it does.

2 This is potentially harmful depending on what the ToS define as "provider" and "user". We don't know since the ToS don't exist (unless the thing on Github is the ToS? that's very unclear):
By using the FCW website, you voluntarily choose to be in a provider/user relationship under our Terms of Service.
3 I think the following sentence is intended to give them compliance no matter what they write elsewhere, but I don't find it very clear (what does "the latter" refer to? what are the ToS and Repo Policy? what are "our licenses"?):
In any case where an interpretation of our Terms of Service or Repository Policy can be established to be in non-accordance with our licenses, the latter shall be assumed to be what is operative.
The "Pull Request" part is still as bad as before for the rights of potential contributors, but nothing prevents them from requiring whatever they want to include contributions. There's also this part:
audio/art or other content under whatever appropriate licensing or exemptions may allow or entitle such
5 This sentence is probably inoperative unless they build a new tileset from scratch, but I think it's still dangerous.

Louis
1. Poorly written how? It expertly uses exact English words chosen for their exact disambiguation, specificity, and general inclusivity. In perfect grammar. If after looking up words you don't know, you still don't know what it means, you can ask.
2. A provider is someone who provides the product, in this case "software as a service", to a user. A user is the one who uses the service. Don't try to politicise it as "harmful" without telling people who it harms and how. So that they can either defend, dismiss, or debate that. In other words, cheap unsubstantiated attacks are not part of the culture of an open source collaborative community. Indeed the entire document which is only new, had to be written to PREVENT harmfulness from certain individuals instigating it and diminishing the spirit of good will, collaboration, and percentage of time spent coding.
3. Everything written elsewhere is compliant. But your guess is close. It achieves a result. It means that false claims of violation become more socially and legally actionable against those with malicious intent to perpetuate such claims.
4. "still as bad as before for the rights of potential contributors" -- please don't make slanderous FUD myth. FACT: Our contributors want to know that FCW better protects rights of contributors against legal threats to shut down the service made by malicious parties, which would nullify the effort they attempt to contribute to the community. Thus, the opposite of harmful, and indeed, to prevent harm. Please address any steps you are taking to de-escalate and diminish or retract this environmental ambience you have been witnessed to partake in.
5. This statement avoids 40 pages of details by being well crafted. What it means is, audio and art can have potential difficulties when accessed by an AGPL project; such that, once a contributor submits any art of this kind, the project is protected from retroactive and spurious attempts to execute bad faith against the project. Indeed, 99% of the time it should be inoperative except in such a case of a harmful retroactive malicious person who is not an open source collaborative spirit.

After seeing how unethical, hypocritical, and malicious some people can be while pretending to be pro-open source, this whole document is a warm cuddly safety blanket that lets good people sleep better at night, keeping away the wolves who spend that night dreaming up new ways to exploit weaknesses in the open source culture for their own selfish motives.
sveinung
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Re: Source code for Freeciv-web running on Freecivweb.org

Post by sveinung »

Corbeau wrote:Can they be in compliance with AGPL if they have their own licence at all?
I'm not a lawyer. It has been a while since I read the AGPLv3, copyright law and patent law. This means that what follows most defiantly isn't legal advice and probably not 100% accurate.
Adding a Terms of Service (ToS) for a web page or a CLA to a repository isn't in itself changing the license of the software.
The AGPLv3 covers distributing the software and running the software over a network. (If I recall correctly.) freecivweb.org uses the copyright and patent license (permission to use) granted in the AGPLv3 to run it on freecivweb.org and to distribute it on GitHub.
The Terms of Service covers connecting your browser to freecivweb.org. It isn't a software license, but a permission to connect to the server.
The repo stuff covers submitting code, art etc to the GitHub repository. Things submitted there must still comply with license of the things they are a derived from if they are a derived work. So a patch that changes the web client JavaScript must be AGPLv3.
They probably can't change the license of the software without permission from all the copyright holders. (Some judge could permit such a license change without getting permission from all the owners the license is from in some lawsuits from copyright holders that didn't agree to the license change.)
Last edited by sveinung on Tue Oct 26, 2021 6:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Lexxie
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Re: Source code for Freeciv-web running on Freecivweb.org

Post by Lexxie »

Terms of Service, a Repository Policy, or even an agreement to help you on your homework if you submit some graphics for us ...

What do these all have in common?

They are agreements mutually and voluntarily entered into by parties of their own free will and volition. They have nothing to do with a source code license. A source code license usually covers: source code, its distribution, who gets access to it, how and under what conditions they get that access.

Yes, you can find people who will say "you violated AGPL by saying you'd submit some code if I helped you debug it". Yes, you made additional conditional restrictions on your submission to an AGPL project. But you have to really be counting on people to be dumb if you think they'll be fooled into thinking that non-licensing restrictions outside the scope of a license, are modifications of a license. If that were the case, no AGPL service would even be able to make a EULA or ToS rule against cheating, hacking, or hate speech. Indeed, an AGPL browser would never be 'allowed' to visit sites that had their own ToS, rules, or licensing. Fools of this kind could stretch it so far to say, all art and music accessed by that browser instantly turned to AGPL like the midas touch. Anyone arguing about subtler points of law and licensing should NOT be a binary reductivist, as it's a complex issue taking place within a holistic context that has many different components and laws, conditions, and other agreements at play.

"can there be more than one license?" There can be multiple licenses within a single project, yes. There cannot be multiple licenses which contradict or disallow each other, in a project. AGPL disallows any additional licensing restrictions on any part of the source code released as AGPL, while absolutely not disallowing licensing and non-licensing restrictions on other contexts of the project, unless they explicitly attempted to contradict the license.
sveinung
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Re: Source code for Freeciv-web running on Freecivweb.org

Post by sveinung »

louis94 wrote:
sveinung wrote:This line has been removed. Is there anything else that copyright holders believes makes freecivweb.org non AGPLv3 compliant?
To be honest, I don't know.
Thank you for taking the time to have a look, Louis!
wieder
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Re: Source code for Freeciv-web running on Freecivweb.org

Post by wieder »

There seems to be issues remaining even with the new stuff. As far as I know of. I will comment on the details at a later time. Doesn't make sense to comment atm since the current additional restrictions are still there.
wieder
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Re: Source code for Freeciv-web running on Freecivweb.org

Post by wieder »

The actual issue is this.

I can play the game and use the software.

Can I get the source code for the AGPL licensed stuff? Currently it seems that this is not always the case and this pretty much tells the story about the compliance.
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Corbeau
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Re: Source code for Freeciv-web running on Freecivweb.org

Post by Corbeau »

Just curious: there is a link to the Github repo on the main FCW site. Is the code in the repo the one that is used to run the site and the games? The whole thing?
--
* Freeciv LongTurn, a community of one-turn-per-day players and developers
* LongTurn Blog - information nexus with stuff and stuff and stuff
* Longturn Discord server; real-time chatting, discussing, quarrelling, trolling, gaslighting...
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Canik
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Re: Source code for Freeciv-web running on Freecivweb.org

Post by Canik »

sveinung wrote:
cazfi wrote:The main problem I see (I don't know if Andreas has more in his mind) is that even though AGPL grants their users rights to the source code, their "repository policy" tries to restrict that (bolding mine):
...FCW is NOT required to do work for, nor release source code to anyone with whom we have not entered a voluntary mutual relationship...
From:
https://github.com/Lexxie9952/fcw.org-s ... repository
This line has been removed. Is there anything else that copyright holders believes makes freecivweb.org non AGPLv3 compliant?
Private Website?


"FCW is a volunteer effort and an open source project of a private community."

...
"You have our permission to access our service, for free, if you accept our Terms of Service. In so doing, you are choosing to be a private member of a private internal community. FCW reserves the right to refuse membership to anyone."

Seems to be in conflict with:

"The GNU Affero General Public License is designed specifically to ensure that, in such cases, the modified source code becomes available to the community. It requires the operator of a network server to provide the source code of the modified version running there to the users of that server. Therefore, public use of a modified version, on a publicly accessible server, gives the public access to the source code of the modified version."


https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary ... c+Web+site

"A location on the World Wide Web that is accessible by anyone with a Web browser and access to the Internet. Contrast with private Web site."


freecivweb.org is accessible by anyone with a web browser and access to the internet.

https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary ... e+Web+site

"A Web site available only to internal personnel or to registered users or partners with passwords. Synonymous with deep Web. Contrast with public Web site."


freecivweb.org is not only available to internal personnel, registered users or partners with passwords.

After some research I am quite sure freecivweb.org is a public site. Users can access the site index without registration or any other barrier. Users can access and play games without registration or any other barrier. The only thing you need to create an account with a password for is to save games.

I suppose you could claim your gmail is your password for longturns and that is registration. However, even if that were the case (and I'm not sure that it is), I believe this would need to apply the site content at large not just one section.

Furthermore, you may note in the green quotes above that a private website is synonymous with deep web.

Deep web (private sites) are defined as follows;

"The deep Web is content that is not found on a Google, Yahoo! or Bing search because it has been coded to keep the search engines from indexing it."

From what I am reading it seems like the phonebook system. If you are publicly listed, you have a public number. If you do not list your number in phonebooks then it is private.


Conclusion:

freecivweb.org is a publicly listed site which does not require manual approval by a site administrator, a site password, registration or any other barrier what-so-ever to access site content and games.

freecivweb.org is a public site. It's claim as a private site/server/community is false.

freecivweb.org's attempt to redefine itself as a private service, if recognized, would change it's AGPL 3.0 obligations allowing selective exclusion to it's source code. Indirectly overriding AGPL 3.0's guarantee of source availability to the public. However I do not believe it can legally be redefined as a private site in the manner freecivweb.org is trying. This appears to be a poor attempt to create a loophole or to confuse people as to their rights and fcw.org's license obligations. Please remove it.

To promote better relations with other Freeciv sites, for the Freeciv community at large, and for the sake of not having to read, research and write more posts like this I would recommend removing the additional restrictions entirely or consider dramatically reducing and simplifying them.

~ Canik
cazfi
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Re: Source code for Freeciv-web running on Freecivweb.org

Post by cazfi »

sveinung wrote:
louis94 wrote:
sveinung wrote:This line has been removed. Is there anything else that copyright holders believes makes freecivweb.org non AGPLv3 compliant?
To be honest, I don't know.
Thank you for taking the time to have a look, Louis!
Indeed, I'm quite surprised that Louis still bothered to do a review for them. Lexxie's thank you was a bit hard to decipher as one, though. I don't think I have time to do reviews before the deadline, myself. Unfortunately that means that if there's anything wrong with the stuff, there won't be chance for them to fix it before it's time to shut down FCW.

It's taken them 29 days to start working on this. They can't expect me to be available just the one day they might have something implemented.
cazfi
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Re: Source code for Freeciv-web running on Freecivweb.org

Post by cazfi »

louis94 wrote:The "Pull Request" part is still as bad as before for the rights of potential contributors, but nothing prevents them from requiring whatever they want to include contributions.
I were been put back by that sentence, but thought that it's their own decision if they want to discourage contributions. Now it occurred to me to check a bunch of source files, and now I see why that part is needed. While it's unusual statement for an open source project, it goes together with another unusual property - they don't have copyright notice in the files, stating the license for each one. Usually projects rely on that any contribution is a change to a) a repository that has a certain license, and also b) to a source file that states the license that changes are made under.
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